Sugar it’s so bad

Sugar is the topic today. Kids are eating too much before they get to school!! With my dentist, father and consumers hats on today I shall give a wee insight.

As a dentist sugar causes tooth decay, disease and tooth loss as well as associated pain. This results in fillings, extractions and the problems of aesthetics which lead onto self esteem and mental health issues as well as dental phobias.

As a parent and consumer sugar is in majority of what we eat or drink. Be it natural i.e. Fruit or milk or honey or maple syrup or refined. Even natural palm sugars and other such sugars available all have sugar in them. Now the sugar I’m talking about is in the form of glucose.

You could call glucose a building block which can be added to to make starch in Bread, pasta or rice and these can also be broken down to glucose. Our bodies fuel is glucose so we should be able to get a proportion of our fuel from natural sugars. It’s the added ones which are the killers.

Our bodies store this extra glucose as fat and we all get fatter and the manufacturers wallets get fatter and I dare say many influential people like politicians also benefit.

“Fat” people have their own issues like diabetes, heart disease, and mental issues like body dysmorphic syndrome i.e. They hate how they look and feel about themselves. This in turn leads to anorexia and mental health issues. Get the picture.

Why do manufacturers use sugar?

Ans: it’s cheap, readily available, addictive and a preservative. A certain US brand uses high fructose corn syrup (a cheap sugar syrup) in over 1000 of its lines from mayo to soup to sauce to cereal- I could name them but won’t.

This is putting a huge burden and time bomb on our health and services and is entirely preventable. We are in the early stages of a diabetes, heart disease, obesity and tooth decay epidemic and it ain’t getting better!!

I would love you all to read, share and heed this. I’ve a bank of fotos of rotten teeth, kids as young as 3 having general anaesthetics to extract 20 baby teeth. I’ve also seen kids come to my surgery eating sweets and drinking fizzy drinks!!!!!

8 thoughts on “Sugar it’s so bad”

Indeed, added sugar in foods (it’s even added to cheese, milk products, and hundreds of processed foods and drinks) is a problem that is contributing to the global epidemic of Type II Diabetes, where we are fast approaching 1 in every 6 people becoming insulin resistant, and thus contributing to the increased risk of heart attack and stroke as well. People are dying, one bite of sugary food at a time.

If you want to check out a great read (if you haven’t already), I highly recommend Michael Moss’ book, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”. Great investigative journalism, informative and entertaining, and also everything you need to know about why people like myself do not eat processed food, limit eating out, and cook at home.

One small addition to your post: Body Dysmorphic Syndrome is not limited to those who are overweight. It also occurs in people who are extremely thin, yet counter to the visual data they see every day, believe there is something fundamentally “wrong” with their body. It is a serious mental illness, and much more rare than the Eating Disorders of Anorexia, Bulimia, and Binge Eating Disorder.

To your post, the main point is clear: when people eat excess sugar on a regular basis, there is a whole host of physical health problems that are triggered by that sugar which can be fixed by the conscious removal of those sugary foods, as well as to replace them with sugar-free, healthy options and institute exercise at even two hours of vigorous exercise per week (so saith the most recent science experts on the subject).

Getting people to reduce the sugar, however, is no small feat. It’s an addiction, perhaps worse than cocaine, tobacco, or heroin.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve heard sugar feeds cancer, yet it tastes wonderful, is easy to produce and certain people have gotten rich growing beets and cane (depending on your source) … Living in Florida, the thing that grinds my teeth is that in order to grow cane, years ago, the drained a lot of the Everglades using canals, etc. Now, with around 100 MILES of canals, they realize the Everglades was a necessary water filter, so they’re trying to restore it… Dare I speculate if they’d be doing this IF people hadn’t figured out the health issues associated with sugar?